Culture of condonation and impunity

Patriarchal societies have an arcane attitude towards sex crime. How the inadequacy of the view gets exposed unaware at times is best illustrated by the recent naïve statement by the country's police chief. He preferred as innocuous a term as 'naughty boys' to refer to the sexual assaulters of the outrageous Pahela Baishakh incident near the Teachers Student Centre of Dhaka University. On the same day two other incidents of sexual abuse involving two girl students -one of them an indigenous one - of another two public universities also took place.
Since then there has been a series of undesirable developments. When prompt action were the order of the day, the administration was found disinterested in getting the truth out. Instead, there was a clear sign of shelving the matter under the carpet. More, those protesting the inaction and intrigues by bringing out a peace rally were made a target of brutal police attack on the street. Once again, violence was unleashed against a terrified girl protester. The difference between sexual violence and physical violence disappeared only to drive home the ugly message of a repressive patriarchal society.
If crimes happen in the mind, incidents like this are certainly something that activate the evil psychological circuit. The resultant chain reaction takes society by storm. Now the sexual predatory instinct is proving so contagious that one loses count of the many sex crimes taking place all across the country. Only a few of such incidents make screaming headlines for reasons of the sensitivities attached to those. The gang rape of an indigenous girl in a moving microbus on the Kuril-Biswa Road has drawn national attention for reasons understandable. In a similar incident, a female garments worker was raped in a bus by its driver and two assistants before dumping her on the roadside near Fatullah.
So frequent are such crimes that people in general are nearly becoming accustomed to those. Only more so because the perpetrators of sex crimes are not routinely punished! When zero tolerance to such crimes should have been the social norm, there is a section of defendants -both civilians and men in uniform -who help quash the case through its weak framing. This is a legacy of the prevailing mentality of the majority of male members of society. The police chief is just an authentic representative of that mindset gone awry.
For social institutions to come of age, there is a need for long and continuous nurturing over a long period of time. But virtues and morality left unattended can prompt a precipitous slide in no time. How corrupt and compromising minds invite social degeneration can best be illustrated by a few outrageous incidents that shook the nation's conscience. The first one is the rape and murder of a girl named Yasmin. This was followed by a similar incident involving another girl, Seema by name. In both cases, the men in uniform were the sexual predators and murderers.
The other loathsome incident is about a student of the Jahangirnagar University, Savar, who happened to be a political turncoat. So shameless a sex pervert was he that he could even boast his 'achievement of scoring a century'. What kind of century was his? That he made 100 girls the victim to his pervert sexual drive was an achievement for him. What treatment did the university concerned and society at large mete out to this fiend from hell? Nothing.
This explains to a large extent that society and institutions are failing in their respective responsibilities to deter the sexual predators. In contrast, matriarchal societies to which the indigenous (Garo) rape victim in the microbus belongs are nearly free from such sexual violence. They were once totally free from this vice. But in recent times quite a number of such attacks, where the attackers were from communities other than their, have been reported. Their societies are caught unguarded by a mainstream turbulent society.
In this context, the statistics on sex crime published by the US Department of Justice are quite revealing. About 20 million out of 112 women in the United States of America have been raped in their lifetime. The figure constitutes 18 per cent of the total women in that country. Bangladesh is fast catching up with countries like the US. The countries in this part of the world abhorred to be compared with Western countries when it comes to sex crimes. Infamous Jack the Ripper was a monster to people here. But the century achiever in rape enjoyed impunity.
It is exactly at this pint it hurts most. The values and norms in oriental societies are different from Western free societies. There is no point accepting everything from those societies as a gift for the peoples in this region. Demeaning women is nothing less than showing disrespect to half of the human kind. At this stage of societal development, law alone cannot stem the rot. But if it is applied without discrimination and with an urgency to take the fight to the culprits, at least it will leave a deterrent effect on sexual predatoriness.
A more effective remedy, though, would be to change the mentality from within. Family should be the ideal ground for schooling young male members about the normal equation between man and woman. When family will expand to include entire society, sex crimes will definitely be few and far between.
[email protected]